Dealing with Student Resistance
Any time you change a pedagogical approach you risk running into student resistance. People resist change. It is that simple. College students have been used to teachers lecture all through high school and just about all of their college experiences. Students are extremely smart and they have rapidly evolved skills that optimize their approach to getting great grades. The approach outlined on this web site does not emphasize grades, but rather deep learning of concepts and skills that will be retained for the rest of their lives. This is a very different focus.
Students may actually feel that they have not learned the material because they don’t get to take tests and never get the kind of feedback that they are used to. The approach suggested here requires that they read the book. Many students have never had to read a textbook. Most high schools only use textbooks for reference and do not assign regular reading assignments. Those that do have the problem that the students simply ignore the reading assignments. So, how do you deal with the mismatch between what the students are used to and what we are asking them to do in this deep learning approach?
The first approach should be communication with the students before the course even begins. Make it clear why you are changing your approach and let the students see how the course will be taught. It helps to spend the first day of class talking about why team based learning, peer instruction, reading with group annotation, etc. will help them learn in a way that ensures retention. You can also talk about how it is kind of fun.
But, … things may still go wrong. Below are a few examples of how student resistance can rear its ugly head.
Resistance to reading annotations:
This is the hardest of the issues as it really represents more work for students and in many cases, much more work. Most students start to realize that they are actually learning after 5 or 6 assignments. So, the hardest challenge is to get to that point. Obviously, if they do start to realize that they are learning, that is fantastic. But, many do not. Here are a few ideas to get to that point:
1) Make it easy for them to get a good annotation grade. If they are doing poorly, talk to each student and show them why just making a statement will not score well. Tell them that they need to make a statement and then justify it with one or two more sentences. Alternatively, if they ask a question and don’t make an attempt to answer their own question they won’t score well.
2) Explain that it is best to make 25-50% more annotations than are required. That gives them a better chance of getting a perfect score for the top 6-10 annotations.
3) Prepare a reading guide. Most students use lecture to tell them what to focus on. When you give them a reading assignment they feel overwhelmed. So, just make a short screencast or announcement and tell them what is important in the reading, what examples they should make sure they understand, and any places where they should be a bit more careful with their reading.
4) Don’t give them too much work. Realize that most students are not very good at reading textbooks. So, ease into it. Give them 20 pages or less per assignment or at least reduce the reading by using the reading guide to reduce what they actually have to read.
5) Keep the annotations to about 10-12 per week. They will not like doing more than that.
Resistance to elimination of lecture:
Many students really believe that they need to listen to a lecture to learn. Even showing them data about active learning does not usually fix this misconception. But, if you make sure that they have invested time into learning - say by making sure they made an honest attempt at reading the book - then it is ok to lecture. It is critical that the students have made that attempt. If they have, then they may very well be frustrated that they cannot solve the problems you give them in class. In that case, go ahead and lecture. But only about the one concept that is critical for solving that problem. If set up properly, everyone in the class will actually WANT to listen. Then go back to your in-class activities and you will see that they just learned.
Create a community to solve student resistance issues:
One of the best ways to deal with student resistance is to simply get together and talk to other instructors who are facing similar problems. In order to use these methods it really helps if you can find a few other people who are willing to try it at the same time. Then you can have meetings every other week to talk about the issues you're facing in class. We did this last winter term when five faculty members converted their courses from lecture to this deep learning approach. Our meetings were extremely valuable. We were able to listen to each others problems with student resistance and work together, as a team, to provide remedies and ideas to solve resistance issues. In fact, to this day, I will often go over to the office of one of the people in our trial when I have my own student resistance problems and I find that is incredibly helpful.
So the message is: the best way to deal with student resistance is to talk to other instructors and come up with a method to address these resistance issues. Success will follow as long as you remember to be highly respectful of the students, very transparent, genuinely interested in improving the class, and most of all, caring very deeply about the education of your students.